In July last year, Seagate was the first to launch a 3 TB drive, the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk. It was in fact an external hard drive with a Barracuda XT 3 TB, which hadn’t yet been announced as an internal drive. This has now been done!

The Seagate Barracuda XT 3 TB has an SATA 6 Gb/s interface and a 64 MB cache. Seagate has announced maximum sustained speeds of 149 MB/s, against 138 MB/s for the 2 TB version. This increase in performance can be explained by the higher density – Seagate is now using 600 GB platters rather than 500 GB.

Note that Seagate supplies software designed to get around the 2 Tib / 2.2 TB limitations if you aren’t using a UEFI bios and Windows 7/Vista 64-bit for a boot drive or simply Windows 64-bit for a data drive. Like the ASUS Disk Unlocker , Disk Wizard creates another virutal drive with the drive space beyond the limit supported by your system.